‘In July 2013, PNG’s prime minister, Peter O’Neill, stood next to Kevin Rudd in Brisbane as the Australian government announced its so-called PNG Solution.’
Photograph: Tim Wimborne/Reuters

A regional solution for refugees. That was the liberal sweetener in the “expert panel” report of 2012, a document that endorsed the deterrent of offshore processing. Duly fortified against her left flank (one of the “experts” was Paris Aristotle, a well-respected “refugee advocate”), then prime minister Julia Gillard declared her government would “move urgently to restart offshore processing on Manus Island and Nauru”.

Last week, the Papua New Guinea police opened fire with automatic weapons on university students marching against corruption. That shocking manifestation of overt authoritarianism by Australia’s key partner in offshore detention provides a glimpse of what refugee politics has meant for the region four years down the track.

In July 2013, PNG’s prime minister, Peter O’Neill, stood next to Kevin Rudd in Brisbane as the Australian government announced its so-called PNG Solution. Henceforth, Rudd explained, asylum seekers would not only be processed on Manus Island, they would also (if assessed as refugees) be settled in PNG.

According to the PNG supreme court, the deal was, right from the start, entirely unconstitutional. Nowhere else in the world, said PNG MP Belden Namah, would a politician have “amended the constitution to accommodate another foreign country’s domestic policy interest.”

But, of course, few other countries in the world (other than Nauru, of which more later) relate to Australia in the way that PNG does. PNG was once an Australian colony – “one of the last places in the world where white settler colonialism was advocated as colonial policy,” as John Connell explains in his Papua New Guinea: The Struggle for Development.

Self-government came in 1973 and independence in 1975. The relative lateness of the process left PNG with particularly acute versions of the ills endemic in post-colonial societies, including widespread poverty, economic underdevelopment, weak civil institutions and an ongoing dependence on the former colonial power.

The “PNG Solution” was made possible by those problems, even as it worsens them.

In its report for 2015, Human Rights Watch lists the financial inducements offered by the Australian government to make the Manus Island deal happen.

“Australia remains [PNG]’s most important international partner,” it explains, “providing an estimated US$460m in development assistance for 2013-2014. Australia provided an additional $556.7m this financial year to support the Manus Island detention center.”

Jason Sharman has warned that Canberra has privileged the ... detention centre over the fight against corruption

But O’Neill also possessed his own reasons for signing up.

In 2011, the PNG supreme court ordered him to stand down in favour of Michael Somare, an order with which he simply refused to comply. The agreement with Australia, the regional power, thus provided him with international legitimacy. By promising to deliver refugee resettlement (a plan that was, right from the outset, unpopular in PNG, O’Neill made himself indispensible to Canberra, on the basis of the “he-might-be-a-son-of-a-bitch-but-he’s-our-son-of-a-bitch” principle so beloved of US presidents).

There was no secret about what that meant. A few days after shaking Rudd’s hand, O’Neill boasted that he’d achieved what he called “a realignment” of Australian aid in PNG.

Since then, Professor Jason Sharman, a money laundering expert at Griffith University, has repeatedly warned that Canberra has privileged the maintenance of the detention centre over the fight against corruption.

“The government sends signals,” he told the Guardian, “often reflecting media attention, as to what it wants investigated. Various people have flagged PNG corruption proceeds in Australia as a problem, not least elements of the PNG government and law enforcement as well as the AFP and Austrac, but the Australian government under both Labor and the Coalition has chosen not to investigate, and recently Manus has been a big reason for inaction.”

Two years ago, anti-corruption police issued a warrant to arrest the prime minister over a million-dollar fraud involving the company Paraka Lawyers. O’Neill responded by disbanding the corruption taskforce and installing his own handpicked police chief.

The student demonstration was part of an anti-corruption campaign, seeking to force O’Neill to comply with basic democratic principles.

But the vicious brutality of the PNG police has a context, too – and, again, the links to Australia are telling.

The Manus Island deal entailed a contingent of Australian Federal Police officers training the Royal PNG Constabulary (RPNGC). In late 2015, an AFP whistleblower told the ABC that the Australian government was turning a blind eye to the corruption and police involvement in extra-judicial killings, for fear that the detention centre might be closed.

“The RPNGC were essentially murdering people, raping people, burning villages down,” he said. He’d seen local police commit horrific crimes, he explained, but his reports had been ignored by his superiors.

“What we soon noticed was that anything that painted the government of PNG with corruption, or the RPNGC with their brutality, murder and rape was being sanitised,” he said. The AFP said it had reviewed reports from the officer and hadn’t found any matters requiring further action.

It’s not simply that successive Australian governments, keen to keep the Manus deal alive, do not want to antagonise the PNG government. It’s worse than that.

In the final analysis, the Australian facility on Manus Island relies on coercion to keep asylum seekers detained. That’s why, ever since it opened, it has built a relationship with the most notorious of the PNG police units.

Papua New Guinea’s most thuggish paramilitary police unit – allegedly responsible for rapes, murders and other serious human rights abuses – is being discreetly funded by the Australian Immigration Department to secure the Manus Island asylum seeker detention centre. The ‘Mobile Squad’ officers, who just last month beat a local man to death on the island, are receiving a special living-away allowance of about $100 a day from funding provided by the department.

In February 2014, when detainees began to protest, the Mobile Squad played an important role in quelling the demonstration. As Human Rights Watch explains:

During the incident, many detainees sustained injuries and one detainee was beaten to death. Police allegedly entered firing their guns when violence broke out inside the facility.

This is not an anomaly. Rather, it’s an illustration of how an Australian program that’s only possible because of the weaknesses of a post-colonial society continues to exacerbate those weaknesses.

Or what about the rule of the law? After the supreme court ruled the detention centre to be illegal, O’Neill agreed that it should be closed – a welcome adherence to the separation of powers by a politician with a dubious record of obeying such rulings. But, as Daniel Flitton recently wrote, “the Turnbull government looks to have persuaded PNG to keep the camp open until after the Australian election”.

In other words, in the context of the struggle taking place between students risking their lives to uphold democratic principles and a regime willing to flout the courts, the Turnbull government has … “persuaded” PNG to delay implementation of a supreme court ruling.

After the shootings in Port Moresby, the detainees on Manus Island penned an open letter to pro-democracy activists.

We are very aware of the corruption issues in PNG. Billions of dollars have been given to the PNG government by Australia to run the Manus detention centre. That money has not been used for the people of Manus or PNG, but has been used to deny our liberty and keep refugees illegally imprisoned. We have a common fight against corrupt government in PNG and Australia, and a common fight for freedom from tyranny.

But that commonality could be extended further, for the parallels between what’s happening in PNG and what’s happening in Nauru are striking.

In the same way as Rudd’s “PNG Solution” depended on (and then aggravated) the weaknesses of post-colonial PNG, John Howard’s “Pacific Solution” targeted Nauru as a former Australian colony, independent only since 1968. Nic Maclellan has written at length of the damage the detention centre’s arrival wreaked on an already impoverished society. He writes:

An influx of Australian officials into government positions in Nauru has been accompanied by a neoliberal agenda of privatisation. This has shifted the burden for government failure onto the Nauruan community, even as hundreds of millions of dollars are splurged on Australian companies that manage the detention camps. Over more than a decade, these policies have transformed Nauru’s financial status, increasing its dependency on Australian aid.”

Today, Nauru is a dysfunctional, authoritarian state. Since 2013, the government removed key members of the judiciary and then banned them from re-entering the country. Last year, the criminal code was amended to make expressions of “political hatred” – a term so nebulous as to include almost anything to which the government objects – a crime punishable by seven years jail.

According to Stewart Firth from the ANU, “Justice Minister David Adeang … has seized the opportunity created by Australia’s dependence on his country to amass power and suppress dissent, secure in the knowledge that Canberra will offer little criticism.”

Again, though, one might go further. Canberra is not simply turning a blind eye: by prioritising the detention centre, it’s actively pushing Nauru away from democracy. Conscious of the Australian government’s hostility to journalists investigating its offshore camps, the Nauru regime now levels hugely expensive visas on journalists seeking to visit (a fee of US$5,000, non-refundable if the request’s denied – which it often is).

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The policy’s obviously driven by Australian priorities but it has equally obvious consequences for domestic politics on the island. The same might be said of Nauru’s ban on Facebook: on the one hand, a sop to the Australian government (which loathes detainees communicating with activists); on the other, a way of inhibiting opposition activity within Nauru itself.

Because of the detention centres, the effects of Australian refugee policy are most evident on PNG and Nauru. But the ramifications are also visible in less dramatic form elsewhere.

Australia is rarely pushing for rights-respecting solutions these days – and more than that, is too often part of the problem. Politicians trapped in the refugee policy dialogue in Canberra frequently fail to recognise that Australia’s boat push-back policies, and offshoring asylum seekers into abusive conditions of detention in Nauru and on Manus Island, are seen as a green-light by Asian governments to do the same …

By soliciting governments to help stop boats, Australia also ends up looking the other way on other rights abuses. By cooperating with Australia to take back boats of their nationals, both Sri Lanka and Vietnam know they could count on Australia not to publicly raise concerns about the rights abuses that drove those people into the boats in the first place.

Push backs by other countries are also met with silent acquiescence from Canberra. Australia said nothing when Thailand sent back 109 ethnic Uighurs in July to China to face torture in custody and long prison terms, and has kept silent as Beijing pursues its dissidents in Bangkok. China arrests and sends fleeing North Koreans back to the brutal regime of dictator Kim Jong-Un, and is met by deafening silence from down under.

Within Australia, debate about refugee policy generally focuses on the domestic political implications. But we’re going to be dealing for decades with the regional consequences of a “regional solution” developed by years of bipartisan policy – the connivance at horrific abuses throughout the Asia Pacific region.